Free Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History by Glen Berger Page B

noticed Michael Curry picking up a wad of something in a Baggie. He walked a few paces away from us. He turned, lifted his hand, and— THWWWIPPPP! —a fifty-foot ribbon of white shot out of his hand in a blur. We rubbed our eyes, because the ribbon was still somehow hanging in midair, the whole length of it quivering.
    Now the ribbon was fluttering away, and as our jaws returned from the floor, Michael explained how he attached one end of a bungee-like cord to the wall, and then affixed a fifty-foot length of silk to the other end of the bungee, and then wadded the silk up into this little pouch. Concealing the pouch in his hand, he walked away from the wall, thereby pulling the nearly invisible bungee taut. By holding on to the pouch but releasing one end of the silk, he achieved the web-shooting effect. Simple, with plentyof theatrical bang for the buck, it was a quintessential “Taymor Effect.” We could cross another item off the to-do list.
    Now Chris Daniels—the stunt double for Tobey Maguire in the first two Spider-Man films—was being fitted in a “twisty belt” (actually, the “Climbing Sutra Spinning Harness”), a swiveling metal hoop, with three cables attached to it. He was standing in front of a mock-up of Peter’s bedroom—five large lightweight panels which formed the floor, ceiling, and three walls of a forced perspective room.
    A recording of Jim Sturgess singing “Bouncing Off the Walls” blared from speakers, and Chris was hoisted into the air and sent backward, careening into a wall. A flip and a half put him into a handstand, enabling him to spring off the floor and spin like a pinwheel toward the ceiling and then sing the next verse upside down as the walls (held in place by puppeteers) twirled and swayed to the melody, so that it wasn’t just the music and the aerialist but the set itself telegraphing exuberance.
    The scene was pretty fantastic, even though the cables were distracting, and the twisty belt was inelegant. A discussion with costume designer Eiko Ishioka and her assistant, Mary, quickly ruled out any possibility of hiding that big metal ring around his waist. Julie concluded that the audience would just have to embrace the necessity of the setup.
    “In fact,” she said, “ Peter Parker should embrace it. Have him toss the cables to a crew guy. You know? ‘Hook me up, Joe!’ ” Expose the artifice. This was an approach Julie had taken in dozens of shows, and when the gambit worked, theatre asserted its theatricality, and it felt good —like how life felt when we were tots, regularly shifting back and forth from reality to make-believe in our minds.
    And when such a gambit didn’t work? Then it was just a lot ofembarrassingly clunky machinery. But we were pretty sure having Peter acknowledge the cables would immunize the scene from awkwardness. Pretty sure. The trick to doing any scene with cables was remembering that the scene was not about the hardware, it was about the emotion . In this case, it was about Peter’s joy, his exhilaration. “Hook me up, Joe!” A shout-out to a crew guy almost said it better than the flying effect itself—Peter was so exuberant he was breaking the fourth wall! We just had to remember this insight when it came time to put it onstage.
    And . . . we didn’t.
    Moving on, here were two stage directions near the beginning of the script that I wrote in five easy seconds: “Arachne’s weavers make a giant tapestry”; and “The tapestry is destroyed by Athena.” Danny had a notion for how to achieve this, and recruited eight dancer-acrobats from Los Angeles who were unafraid of heights.
    With a wistful chuckle, Danny once told me how he and Julie nearly killed each other during their first project together—a 1995 production of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman . But Julie was loyal and Julie was practical—she stuck to artists she could trust. Danny was now one of her closest confidants, having choreographed The Green Bird in